By: AswathyNair
About 450,000 tourist workers have lost their jobs in Sri Lanka as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic deepens. The job destruction includes 180,000 direct employees with the remainder from indirectly-related industries.
Most tourist service providers in Sri Lanka, including hotels, destination management companies (DMCs), tourist shops, cultural sites, national parks and restaurants, are closed, throwing temporary and contract employees out of work.
As the World Tourism Organization recently noted, global tourism has been “hit hard, with millions of jobs at risk in one of the most labor-intensive sectors of the economy.”
According to local data, tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka fell 6.5 percent in January, 17.7 percent in February and 70.8 percent in March, before plummeting to zero in April. Tourism is Sri Lanka’s third-largest foreign exchange earner.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only impacted on Sri Lankan tourism but other key foreign income earning industries, big and small.
Hotels Association of Sri Lanka chairman Sanath Ukwatte told the media that the organisation expected the Rajapakse government to help his members “safeguard the jobs of the people in the industry, because we can’t do it on our own.” He called on Colombo to continue providing working capital loans at 4 percent interest on long-term payback terms. Early last month, the government provided these concessionary loans mainly to big business.
In southern Sri Lanka, there are about 500 safari tourist vehicles with around 600 drivers and vehicle owners. “Because the owners have lost their income, the drivers have lost their jobs,” a safari driver said. “It is extremely difficult” to support a family of five, with two young daughters who were still at school, he said. His oldest son, a casual worker at a finance company, has not been paid since March.
Referring to the COVID-19 crisis, the safari driver said: “The rulers take this pandemic absolutely lightly. For President Trump the number of deaths in the US is just a figure. Counting the number of deaths is like a game of cricket to these people. They want the people to go back to work at any cost. They want to build up their economy and are only concerned about their own survival.
“People are suffering because they do not have any money but [the rulers] insist that we must go to work,” he said, raising his concern that President Rajapakse had eased Sri Lanka’s lockdown too early. The US and other Western rulers were “opportunistically seeking to use the pandemic to advance their own interests, and to use it against China.”
